Now it is being followed by another flood – of information. Disaster relief teams are pouring into the Philippines from all over the world, trying to get aid to victims amid a jungle of severed roads, shattered buildings and downed power and telecommunications lines. But they have a new ally. For the first time, social media is being mined by an army of volunteers to provide aid workers with real-time maps of who needs help, and where.

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And it’s getting worse. “We have had an unusually large number of tropical cyclones this year,” says Jun Yumul of the University of the Philippines in Quezon City. “The average is 19 or 20. This year 25 made landfall.” What’s more, weather patterns are changing and sea levels are rising (see “Climate change worsened disaster“, below).

Hazard maps

The Philippines has a huge national programme to cope with the risk of typhoons and flooding – with natural hazard maps distributed and explained. Despite this, people are facing conditions they never experienced before&colon; designated shelters that were expected to withstand the storm collapsed as Haiyan hit. The projected death toll far surpasses the country’s previous deadliest storm – Thelma in 1991 – and previous strongest typhoon, Bopha, just last December.

Delivering aid in such circumstances is always hard. “We’re operating in a relative black hole of information,” says Natasha Reyes, emergency coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières in the Philippines. “No one knows what the situation is in more rural and remote places, and it’s going to be some time before we have a full picture.”

That might be changing. These days, a problem facing relief workers is too much information, in too many places and too many formats. The need for triage becomes enormous, says John Crowley of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. “A decade ago, disaster relief workers got a few emails a day over sporadic satellite phones,” he says. “Now the flood of messages reaches one per second, 24/7.” That’s thanks to emergency telecoms infrastructure, such as the inflatable broadband antennas being deployed in the Philippines by Luxembourg firm, Emergency.lu. Relief workers cannot possibly sift through it all.

Enter MicroMappers‘s global network of volunteers. “I had an email last night [Monday] from a relief worker in the Philippines saying they didn’t know what was going on outside the cities,” says Andrej Verity of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). Verity sent a real-time map of where people were asking for help and where destruction was greatest, created using data from MicroMappers. “They were ecstatic,” he says.

Tweet mining

MicroMappers harnesses volunteers who sift through social media coming out of disaster zones. “Anyone can join,” says Verity. A volunteer is given a few tweets, for instance, tags them according to whether they are requesting or offering help, notes whether the tweets have imagery, and rates the scale of destruction pictured.

Volunteers are also helping to keep maps up to date using OpenStreetMap, which allows expatriates and people in the vicinity to work in a Wikipedia-style collaboration. “As of Monday, we had 770,000 edits of maps of the affected area,” says Verity. The volunteers fill in roads and details not available on published maps.

The next step will be to create open software that lets relief agencies exchange information and data. “A lot of data is generated about an affected area during a disaster, which just disappears afterwards,” says Crowley. That includes where and how the destruction happened. Relief agencies cannot share this information as they use incompatible systems.

So UNOCHA is leading an effort to develop a Humanitarian Exchange Language, which will allow data to be shared. This would let groups coordinate their response, see the big picture, and later analyse what happened. Ultimately this trove of data could help efforts to prepare for the next storm, by showing which locations and buildings were most vulnerable. If we can share the data we get from responding to disasters now, it may help prevent disasters in the future, says CJ Hendrix of UNOCHA.

“Collecting and analysing information learned from this event can help build resilient communities,” agrees Yumul. “But climate uncertainty is a reality, so what we learn from Haiyan may only serve as a guide.”

Climate change worsened disaster

An unfortunate interplay between typhoon Haiyan’s power and direction, and a landscape that funnelled a 5-metre-high storm surge straight at the city of Tacloban, spelled disaster last week. Add to the mix higher-than-normal sea levels owing to climate change and you have the recipe for a human catastrophe.

The typhoon was funnelled through the channel separating the island of Samar from the island of Leyte. Tacloban sits on a promontory poking into the channel, and so was exposed as the storm approached. Haiyan’s high wind speeds pushed a surge of water into the channel, which gained height in the shallower waters close to land, says Julian Heming, the tropical prediction specialist at the UK Met Office in Exeter. “The storm surge got driven straight into it,” he says.

This isn’t the first time the region has suffered because of its location. A 7.3-metre surge hit almost the same region in 1897, notes Hal Needham, a climatologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who runs a global storm surge database called SURGEDAT. Known as the typhoon of Samar and Leyte, it killed an estimated 1300 people.

Since then, a further factor has come into play. Global satellite data gathered between 1992 and 2013 show that the Philippines is a hotspot for sea level rise. And tidal gauge data from Albay, a province on Luzon Island to the north-west of Samar, show that the sea level has risen 30 centimetres in the Philippines over the past 60 years. Compare that with a global average of 19 centimetres since 1901.

“These rises seem particularly high,” says Aslak Grinsted of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, changes in wind patterns over the tropical Pacific are playing a key role in driving up local sea levels. They appear to be piling up water in the western Pacific, exacerbating global sea level rise due to expanding warmer oceans and melting ice sheets.

Grinsted says that higher sea levels may have worsened the impact of typhoon Haiyan. Indeed, climate scientists have been warning for some years that rising sea levels pile more water into storm surges, causing them to wreak more damage on coastal regions. For example, coastal flooding caused by superstorm Sandy in 2012 is thought to have been made worse by the rises in sea levels around lower Manhattan. Andy Coghlan. Additional reporting by Michael Marshall

This article will appear in print under the headline “Aftermath of a typhoon”